I spent a few months making this generator!
Pleeeeeeease read the following info at least once! I promise it will take less than a month to read this! At least read the parts that are BOLD, ok?

My Character Generator: Disclaimers, Notes, and Comments.

So, you wanna know -- is this a 3.5 generator, or is it for Pathfinder? The answer is... not exactly. This character generator has been created to make characters for my own, personalized (okay, bastardized) 3.5/Pathfinder hybrid. It follows the SRD in most respects, but there are a few places where it diverts widely.

Most notably: I have added two extra abilities, Appearance and Luck. I feel these greatly improve the role-playing aspects of the game. You can't bypass them if you're using the generator. If you want to run a campaign without them, you'll have to scratch them off the final character sheet and adjust skill modifiers that depend on them.

I have streamlined and customized the skills table. There are only 20 broad-based skills. This reflects a Pathfinder-like approach to skills, except even more pared-down.

If a skill is a class skill for ANY of your classes, it is considered a class skill for all levels. In other words, if you are a bard/cleric, you can spend skill points earned when your cleric level increases on bard-only skills. This seems more realistic to me, as real people can develop old skills while still learning new ones.

I kind-of hate the term "Congeniality" for the charisma-based skills, as it also applies to intimidate checks, but by the time I decided I hated it, the code was almost finished. Because of the insane combination of static and dynamic elements in the generator, it was too much work to go back and change. Feel free to scratch out the name on your final summary and call it whatever you want.

Players are allowed only 3 total classes -- including prestige classes. Because of this restriction, there are no XP penalties for cross-classing.

I've used whatever online/digital resources I could find when generating dropdown lists for selecting feats/items/weapons/etc. As a result, the level of detail in certain areas varies widely. Things that were directly part of the SRD are pretty well-documented. There was also a decent amount of detail in several Pathfinder resources I found. For obscure things (like feats from 'Citiscape', etc.) the details are sketchy. However, resource names and page numbers are provided for most of the odd stuff, so it should be fairly easy to look up. I didn't weed out any of the odd stuff (like monster-only feats) so, rule of thumb: if you don't know what it is, either look it up or don't take it. It would suck to take "Enlarge Mucus Cloud" if you aren't an Aboleth.

A fighter's extra feats may be used to purchase any feat. (Presumably, they'll choose a lot of combat-related feats anyway.)

Levels are determined by the 3.5 EXP table, not Pathfinder.

In my campaigns, characters start the game with two assets and two flaws. You can generate them randomly or select your own. You can ignore them on your final sheet if you want.

There is a strange economic phenomenon that appears in all my games. Very inexpensive weapons and armor are (apparently) relatively rare and therefore their price is highly inflated (any item costing less than 1 gp is inflated to 1 gp.) The opposite phenomenon occurs in all other items that cost less than 1gp-- they're free! Take what you can carry!

Things related to the generator's function:

Yes. It's ugly.

It looks like "Miami Vice threw up on my computer screen" for two reasons. First: I'm lazy and this already took forever and I hate CSS. Secondly: The end result was meant to be something easily copied and pasted into another document. Feel free to modify to your heart's content after you copy/paste.

READ STUFF ON THE PAGE!

The text on each page is important!! Read it!

Please! If the generator throws an error at you, read it!! It's possible there's a bug, but it's also possible you missed something. The generator is designed to make you get it right.

You're on your own for choosing spells. I ran out of steam. There are some great online resources for finding and tracking spell lists.

Please don't look closely at the code. It's a Frankenstein of snippets from Stack Overflow, W3Schools, and a rather impressive library of books on HTML/CSS/php/MySQL/Javascript/JQuery/Ajax, etc., etc., etc. If I was a professional, I'd probably be appalled by the code. But I'm not. And hence, I'm just quite proud the damn thing works.

I've done my best to make it "unbreakable," but I'm not a professional web-designer (which you'll undoubtedly notice if you ignore my heartfelt pleas and look at the source code anyway.) If bugs pop up, please let me know.

I tested nothing in IE or Chrome or Opera or Safari. Since Javascript is a client-side resource, different browsers can react differently to it. If you have issues with it, you should use Firefox, where everything seems to work without incident. And no, I have no plans on ever changing that. I hate Javascript.

Text in the "Description" boxes is often sloppy. This is because the online SRD database available for download (thank you, andargor.com, for that amazing resource) contains raw html/css markup in these fields. Quotes, apostrophes, and line breaks, don't play nicely when passed from MySQL through php and then into Javascript with the ultimate goal of being deposited into a text box (and should not be formatted for HTML.) There's probably a way to address this. I didn't. Instead, I just deleted problematic text using a simple find/replace in Excel or MySQL. Hence, text may run together, appear disjointed, etc. I'm hoping you're smart enough to figure out what the text is supposed to mean. If not... well, there are books, so look it up.

The drop-down lists are all generated dynamically, which means it's easy for me to add races/classes/feats/equipment. If you want me to add any of the above, just let me know and I'll be happy to make the changes so they appear on the generator. I CAN'T change the skill table or abilities without completely re-addressing the code. So I won't be doing that and you'll have to adapt.

The 3.5 rules call for level adjustments on powerful characters. You can, of course, simply subtract the levels and enter a lower-level character than your EXP reflects, but the generator will NOT let you proceed if your total levels don't match the EXP you've earned, so you'd have to enter an EXP value that matches your adjusted level. Alternately, as you'll see with normally-level-adjusted races (like Drow and Warforged) I've used my Magical Dungeonmaster Powers and modified the racial characteristics to contain drawbacks as well natural advantages. Hence, no level-adjustments needed.

There are places where I've used some coding shortcuts (in the interest of spending less time staring at Stack Overflow pages.) So, if you somehow manage to earn more than 100 feats or purchase more than 100 weapons, anything over 100 won't show up on the final summary. The weapon restriction also applies to changing your mind. If you have added over 100 weapons to your sheet and then deleted them, anything over your 100th choice won't appear on your final character sheet.

I've automated as much of the process as possible. However, you're on your own when it comes to a few things, like tracking bonuses from feats (the generator has a place to enter them, but it doesn't happen automatically.) Also, because skills are generated before feats are chosen, if you have a feat that adds a bonus to a skill, you'll have to add it manually at the end. You'll also have to manually keep track of the extra ability points you choose when you level up. You'll just have to add those points at the beginning as if they were base rolls. There's a box to check if your "base roll" data is over 18.

The generator is "level-up friendly." It shows you your original rolls so you can re-enter them when you level up.

The whole project easily took more time than if I'd manually generated 50 characters. In many cases, the code was the easy part -- understanding and applying the tax-code-like encyclopedia of obscure 3.5/Pathfinder rules was the hard part. Fortunately, I have a dozen years of experience with the latter. Unfortunately, I have virtually no experience with the former! I hope it's useful!